Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
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ESRB:
Blood,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.warhammeronline.com/
Gameplay InnovationWhile Warhammer Online is mostly a derivative game that concentrates on picking out things that work from games that came before, it has some fresh ideas that will hopefully become standard features in the future. Things like achievement system, titles, points or other rewards for completion of certain tasks are not really groundbreaking - Everquest 2 had some, Console games have been doing it and World of Warcraft is working to add them in a big way. But Warhammer Online takes the idea even further with the Tome of Knowledge. Instead of giving you just a list of achievements and a score, there is a whole "book" in-game with a lot more. Exploration is rewarded with tome unlocks - find specific object, NPC or area in the game world, and you are rewarded with some experience and a chapter explaining the background lore unlocks in the book. Monster and player bashing is also recorded carefully, and there are achievements - tons of them.
Tome of Knowledge is a quest log, achievement list, gameplay statistics, bestiary and tons of background lore, all rolled into one. It also means that supplemental lore is not pushed on you - you get a note whenever additional background information is available, but you are free to ignore it if it's not your thing. World of Warcraft has sometimes been accused of pushing story and background lore down the throats of those who couldn't care less, but in Warhammer Online it's all optional, and you can browse it at your leisure. Public Quests Bashing away to complete a Public Quest. The highly promoted Public Quests are the other big new idea. Each chapter in the expected progress path has three public quests - constantly looping open events with rewards for players who participate. Whenever you enter the area, status of the public quest is shown. If nobody is participating, the quest is in Stage I, which is usually a simple "kill X mobs of certain type" step with no time limit. This part is usually doable alone if you insist, but the idea is that if someone else walks by they can join in to assist. Once the stage is complete, the quest moves to further stages that have a time limit and usually involve harder monsters. Once the final stage is complete, a chest spawns and loot is awarded randomly, with bonuses added to rolls based on the level of participation. If you end up losing the roll, you get a bonus for the next round of the PQ and influence points are awarded for everyone just for participating. Each chapter has three sets of rewards obtainable by gathering influence from the three available quests, so PQs hand out "baseline" equipment to everyone who bothers to complete them. Warhammer Online also features Public Groups. While it's not strictly needed to group up for PQs, it's a great feature - at least initially. Anyone can start up a public group visible to everyone in the area, and anyone can join in from a list of available groups. Groups are sorted by range from the player and activity - RvR, PQ, PvE, and there is no need for all that messy "LFG" stuff. Warhammer Online also further develops the "battleground" mechanic familiar from World of Warcraft. For small-scale PvP you can queue up for Scenarios where small equally-sized teams can bash it out. Instead of honor points, you are awarded renown which fills up a secondary experience bar - your renown rank. Renown is also handed out for any kills in open RvR. In addition to renown, all PvP combat also rewards normal experience - and that means you can level completely by doing just PvP. What's new with the scenarios is that there are separate scenarios for each level tier and each pairing of races, and you can queue up for a fight anywhere in the zones of that tier - no need to stand next to a NPC to start the queue. When the fight ends, you are returned to where you were when you entered the battle, allowing you to quest around while waiting for a new scenario to open up.
Yet Warhammer Online hasn't taken the idea of being able to enter and leave a battle from anywhere all the way. While you can queue to multiple scenarios, the queuing is still limited by your location and requires you to fly between different areas to start up a queue in all scenarios available to your tier - or you need to be in a group that is spread between different areas, queuing as a group from multiple locations. This is an obvious shortcoming and results in less scenarios opening up as players are spread between three different scenarios on each level tier. This is such an obvious problem that just has to be fixed.
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